


Still Burning

by TourmalineGreen



Category: Burn This - Wilson, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Infidelity, Past Character Death, Poe is Robbie, Unsafe Sex, choose your own interpretation, plot is deliberately left vague, sexy missing scenes, the Burn This reylo smut AU that some of you asked for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-04-12 10:25:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19130140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TourmalineGreen/pseuds/TourmalineGreen
Summary: Grief is like an island. Rey is lost there, stranded, alone. Weaving fucking… rafts out of coconut husks. Sparking ill-advised fires with driftwood. No way off, no rescue, only that which she makes for herself.Poe had been good. He hadn’t deserved to die.But he was dead.He was dead, and Rey was alone. A dancer, waiting for a partner.And she’d let Kylo walk right in.





	1. the place is sparsely furnished

**Author's Note:**

> Yo what up this is a shameless Burn This Reylo AU which is not intended to be a full retelling of the entire play, so... you might want to familiarize yourself with the play before reading, but I'm not gonna tell you how to live your life. The scenes are intended to pick up at some of the fade-to-black moments. Unbridled emo garbage awaits; abandon all hope ye who scroll here.

**** This is a mistake. 

All her senses scream a warning when his body draws near. It’s like he’s a fire, and she’s too close—burning, he’d said. A heater in his belly. She’s burning, too. Not throwing herself on an altar but standing far too close to a sacrificial pyre. All of the rage, and the fear, and the pain, it’s dry tinder. Or maybe she’s the dry tinder, and he’s the match. 

When he comes near, Rey doesn’t move. She’s frozen, somewhere between fight and flight. Somewhere darker, deeper. Too afraid to acknowledge all of the parts of her that want this. 

Want him. 

His touch on her skin is like the first rough draw of a bow across the strings—a call to motion. The dancer in her wants to move, to stretch, to rise up on her toes and meet him. But the rest of her, the small, frightened creature inside of her, freezes. So he has to move, to take what he wants. 

That’s what he’s been doing since he knocked on her door—shaking up her world, her life, her senses. 

He isn’t gentle with her, the way he leans over, the way he kisses her. Rey’s been kissed before, not so frequently that she has a wealth of experience to draw from, but—enough. 

She’d thought it had been enough. 

Those kisses are nothing, nothing like his. Rationally, she processes it, all in an instant: Kissing is contact, skin to skin. Nothing more, and yet—

Everything. 

His back arches as he bends like a tree in a storm to kiss her, mouth working down across her lips—she can barely keep up with him; reason and sense has flown out the window—to her jawline, her throat. He’s all teeth and tongue and the rasp of stubble on her oversensitive skin, and  _ holy shit _ if this is how he  _ kisses _ what the hell else is he going to do with her? 

Rey feels breathless, like she’s just taken a step off of the fire escape, began to plummet down to the ground. 

“Lemme see those tits,” Ben—Kylo—mutters at her pulse, huge hand sliding up her thigh, pushing the nightgown she’s wearing up and exposing her belly, her plain, white cotton underwear. “I wanna see them… wanna taste them…”

“Kylo, we—“

“Take this thing off,” he says, tugging impatiently at the neckline of her happi coat, exposing her shoulder—then kissing it, setting her skin on fire with each swipe of his tongue, and holy shit she’s never been  _ licked _ on her shoulder as a preamble to sex, but that’s happening, it’s definitely happening, even if this is the worst decision she could be making right now—

“What?”

“Take it off,” Kylo practically growls it, and Rey slides one arm out of the sleeve—but he’s distracted again, remembering that his hand is splayed across her belly, so massive that it feels like it’s spanning across the entirety of her, hip bone to hip bone. “Fuck, you’re so small…”

Rey doesn’t want to feel small. She wants to feel as if she’s big enough to fill this empty room, expanding and expanding, until she’s not a solid creature who can think or feel or want or ache any more. Until her grief is dissipated, like mist in the wind. But she’s grounded by his touch, the discordant ferocity of him. The way he holds her down and reminds her that she’s small, and solid, and human. All the pain and joy of it. 

His big hand slips into her underwear; she gasps. 

“Aww, fuck, Rey,” he says, like it hurts him to feel how wet she is; his mouth is back on her throat, his other hand gripping the back of the couch like he’s going to float away. “Fuck, fucking hell, feel how wet you are? I can fucking hear it—smell it—“

“Kylo,” Rey starts to say something, but all thought flies from her mind, all potential for normal human speech, too, when two of his blunt fingers part her folds. 

She feels as scattered as he’s been acting tonight. Like she’s taken a hit of whatever is fueling him, like she can’t keep herself contained. His fingers seek out her clit like she’s given him a roadmap directly to it, and he slips and swirls around it—too hard, too tight, too much—as Rey’s hands fly up to hold onto whatever of him she can find. 

One hand finds his hair; the other, the smooth silk of his ridiculous shirt. 

Noises are coming out of her throat that she didn’t even know she could make. Finn could be listening—probably is listening—but she can’t stop. 

And he’s still fucking  _ talking… _

“… so fucking sweet, you sound so sweet, so good, can’t wait until I’m three fingers deep in your pussy, bet you’re tight as fuck, sweetheart, make that noise again, fuck, makin’ me hard as hell hearing you come off like that…”

He brings her right to the edge; how the fuck is he so good and so sloppy, it’s got to be more than just whatever this is between the two of them. Rey keens and grinds her hips into his hand—then yelps, when he abruptly shifts off the couch to crouch down on his knees, between her spread legs. 

His big hands go to her hips, and Rey’s almost mustered a violently indignant look down at him—fuck, his fingers are so fucking wet, she can feel her own smeared wetness from his touch, right there on her hip—when he tugs her forward, hips right on the edge of the worn couch cushion, making her slip down into a dissipated slouch. 

Spreading her thighs even wider. 

“What are you—“

He just puts his fucking face between her legs, just like that. Mouths over the wet cotton, blunt nose and tongue working there. Rey cries out and puts her hands into his hair, to tug him away, to bring him close, she doesn’t even know. It’s too confusing, too much to think about when he goes down on her like that. 

And Rey’s been eaten out before, but it was—

Not like this. 

(A quiet, dark room. Tentative touches, a lot of, _ ‘is this okay?’ _ )

This is okay. It’s the most okay she’s felt—the most of anything she’s felt—in a long, long time. And—fucking hell, he’s using his teeth, snapping at her inner thigh, making her squirm away from him, towards him, Rey is floating in a haze of slick-wet sensation, rough cotton, skin and silk, and she’s going to have to apologize to Finn for what they’re doing to this couch—

“…yeah, I can fucking taste you, taste so good—“

“Stop  _ talking _ ,” Rey practically growls, and her fingers tighten in his hair. 

After that, there’s no words at all. Just noises. Plenty of them—from him, like he’s savoring a gourmet meal, and from her, just trying to catch her breath. 

At some point, Rey feels his hand slide up to the elastic of her underwear. Another tug, the sound of wet cloth tearing, and she’s bared before him. And it’s a real sign, how far gone she is, how fucking close she is, that Rey doesn’t even think how she hasn’t shaved or prepared or done anything at all, because Kylo doesn’t seem to care at all, if anything his intensity increases, like he’s getting off on how messy it all is. 

She’s going to come. 

She’s going to come from his mouth, his low, appreciative noises, the rhythm of his tongue and lips into her, against her, the pressure on her clit. Rey grinds her hips and works herself against him, higher and higher, sweat trailing down her body and sticking her nightgown to her skin. Kylo learns fast, studies her body and shifts to lap at the places that make her the loudest. She’s close. 

She  _ needs _ to come. 

And it’s then, of course, that Kylo pulls back, and grins up at her. “You doin’ okay up there?”

Rey can’t speak. She just makes a wounded sort of noise, and feels like she’s going to cry. Her fucking legs are shaking, the cold air is coming in through the window, and he’s stopping *now* to check on her? 

Kylo doesn’t wait for an answer. In one fluid motion, he stands up, his hands hooked underneath her ass, her thighs, holding her as she wraps her legs around his solid torso. Rey rubs her wet and aching center against him, ruining the silk of his shirt, as he carries her over to her bedroom. There’s no thought to ask, no permission save for the desperate noises she’s making. A lock of dark hair falls across his brow, and when she moves she can feel how hard he is, beneath her ass. 

Inside her bedroom, the lights are down low, one lamp lit where she turned it on to come and see who was pounding at the door; Rey insistently hopes that the door won’t be the only thing that gets pounded. And Kylo laughs. 

“Yeah, I think I can help with that—“

“Did I say that out loud?”

“Honey, if you can still talk, it means I’m not doin’ my job right.”

Rey leans back on her bed, sheets and covers still thrown back, where she left them when she got up, and looks up at him. Kylo is standing at the side of her bed, fingers working the buttons from his shirt, dark wet stain on the silk from his mouth and her pussy, and she feels a purr of pleasure as he peels the offending garment off. Then, he’s down to just his briefs. Tight, black briefs, straining from the size of his erection. 

“You weren’t doing your job,” Rey says. “I didn’t come.”

“Not yet,” is all he says, with that smirk on his face and a bulge tenting his briefs that makes Rey shiver, makes parts of her that his mouth was just tasting clench down—on nothing. 

It occurs to her, far too late for reason or sense, that this is the very dictionary definition of a Very Bad Idea: A drunk, coked-up, relative stranger—no, Poe’s  _ brother _ , or maybe-brother, or whatever he is—but she doesn’t know him, doesn’t know him at all, save for his valiant rescue from the attic room of fluttering terror. But now, it’s Rey who’s the stunned butterfly, the one coming awake in the darkness. 

She doesn’t think about that, though. 

Because her eyes are fixed on the last remaining scrap of skin, bared to her at last as he tugs his black briefs down and kicks them away. 

_ Holy shit… _

He crawls up the bed, then, Rey still propped up on her forearms to watch him as he starts licking somewhere behind her knee, like an absolute freak. She wants to squeal and laugh and make this funny, because the lull in the moment has made her realize how fucking sober she is, and how very not-sober he is. Sober enough to make a bad decision? 

_ Ah, fuck it, _ Rey thinks, as he murmurs something that might be an endearment but also might be a curse or a drink order into her inner thigh. 

“I need you,” she moans—a porn parody of herself, desperate and wanton—tugging on his solid shoulders with an optimism that her little touch can move this mountain of a man. 

He moves quickly, for a guy his size. One minute she’s looking down at his bowed head, wondering at how he gets his hair to be so wavy and nice-looking despite how many times he’s raked his fingers through it, and the next, she’s pressed down into the mattress, gasping as his cock finds her entrance and pushes in, as insistent and direct as he is. 

Rey exhales in one sharp breath. 

She feels the stretch of him, the way he fills her—deeper and impossibly perfect—and he barely gives her time to adjust before he starts moving. 

And then—Rey just holds on. Hands on his broad back, chest pressed flush against his overheated body, trying to roll her hips up to meet his steady, pounding rhythm and failing miserably. He doesn’t slow down, doesn’t let up. He just uses her, fills her up again and again and again, until there’s no shame inside, no fear, no caution. 

All the while, Rey doesn’t think about her boyfriend at all. 

(Later, she will. The moment he’s out the door, she definitely will. She’ll think about how easily she spread her legs for this man, how quickly he fucked the very thought of her boyfriend right out of her, how hard he made her come and how much she liked it. But not now. There’s nothing but him right now. And there’s a  _ lot _ of him to contend with.)

Rey just surrenders to it, to him. She lets him break her down until she’s nothing more than a scatter of discordant pieces of need and want. His mouth, kissing filthy words into her skin. His hands, firm on her hips as he draws her practically into his lap, fucking her like she’s a toy—his toy. 

It’s not disconnected, though. She can’t check out from this, can’t compartmentalize it in the safety of the rest of her sane and rational life. It’s too much, too raw, too good.

She isn’t being used—or if she is, it’s a willing kind of use. His dark eyes search hers, like he can see her, all of her, all of the dark parts of herself that she keeps hidden. Everything complicated and raw and brimming just beneath the surface. Her wildness, her illusion. 

She can’t hide from him, not here, not like this.

_ It’s just sex,  _ she thinks, her right hand reaching down to just above where his fucking huge cock is driving into her, angled just so—

“Nah,” he grunts out, “You’re gonna come like this, put your fucking hand back down baby, let me—“

_ Conceited ass—  _ Rey thinks, because she doesn’t come like this, just from this; she never has, most women don’t, anyway—

And then he moves her, just fucking angles her so that his cock is pressing up against the front wall of her pussy, and Rey gasps, tilting her head back as the pressure of her orgasm builds and builds, relentless and intense and inescapably perfect. How the hell…

There’s nothing magic about his cock. Maybe there’s everything magical about his cock. Rey can’t tell anymore—but she’s there, so present and close, allowing herself to surrender to the way he takes her. It’s his eyes, his sweat, his mouth. It’s how he overwhelms her, demands her, won’t stop fucking her until she comes hard for him. 

“Not gonna come until you do, you gonna make me wait? Huh?”

“I can’t—“

“Sure you fucking can,” he grinds out the words like it hurts him to speak, hips pistoning again and again and again. “Fucking come, I wanna feel you come on my cock, want you to come, tell me what I—“

“My clit,” she whines, so close, so much closer than she ever thought she’d get like this. “Touch—“

“Ah,” he growls out, head thrown back, body slick with sweat, hips driving their relentless rhythm inside of her. “Yeah, wanna get you there, baby…”

“Touch… touch it…” 

“Like that?” She’s never fucked someone who talks so much, but his hand is on her clit, stroking it, totally wrong from how she’s used to doing it but so right, such a reminder that this is him, giving it to her. Him and no other. There’s no lights-off-eyes-closed-hand-working to this. It’s all him. 

And something in Rey just… lets go. 

She cries out, makes noises she never knew she could make, high pitched and yet somehow deep in her throat. He fucks the sound right out of her, obscene and wet and heady. He just keeps going, until she can’t do anything but fucking squeak on each thrust. Sideways on her bed; he’s moved her around atop her sheets with the force of him. 

Then, she hears him groan. Feels it as his hands twist in the sheets beside her. 

Feels it, when his body slams into hers, deep and shuddering. Rough breath, singing in her ears. 

She’s just made love to a stranger. 

Oh fuck, she’s just cheated on her boyfriend. 

Gotten carried away, swept up in… in… all that Kylo is. A force of nature, like a tornado, and just as destructive. 

Kylo buries his face against her neck, unashamed and loud in his climax. 

All of her, like debris, floats back down to the torn-up ground. 

* * *

The next morning, she lets Finn tease her about it. What he surely heard, what noises she made… she ought to feel ashamed, and she does, but… it’s probably not for the reasons Finn assumes.

She and Hux aren’t—

It isn’t like she promised she would be—

Hux wants to marry her. Her! The dancer with a dead partner, the choreographer with no art left in her marrow. A  _ pas de un _ , flailing and disconnected. Hux, with his millions and his big ideas. He is good and steady and… maybe doesn’t give her the same thrill that she’d hoped to want, but… he’s a good choice. Solid, practical. 

Everything she should want. 

Isn’t he?

Maybe she’s not the greatest judge of character, though. Or the best at making short-term decisions that line up with her long-term plans. Hux is always wrapped up in his ideas, and she’d told herself that makes it easier to just be herself, live her own life. The modern, independent woman, who doesn’t have needs. Maybe her long-term plans are shit, too. When forced to contend with reality—the truth that she’d just fucked a man whose name is a type of goddamn liquor—Rey feels…

Less shitty than she should, all things considered. 

_ His name isn’t really Kylo, _ she thinks.  _ It’s Ben. Benjamin Solo. Poe’s friend, close like a brother… they were raised together... _

Rey can’t imagine calling that massive, coked-up tornado of a man something so humble, so simple, so normal as ‘Ben.’

Morning feels like she’s slipped and fallen mid-way through a performance. Body wild and uncontrolled. Careful dedication gone, arms flailing in the wind. 

After Kylo leaves, Rey’s left feeling adrift, unmoored. 

She’s so sore. The memory of what she and Kylo did carries with her into the shower, and she stands there, just letting the tepid stream wash over her. The water caresses her neck, where his mouth was. Her back, her hips, where his hands were. She presses her thighs together, winces at how well-used she feels. 

What the hell had she been thinking?

It’s just that grief is like an island. Rey is lost there, stranded, alone. Weaving fucking… rafts out of coconut husks. Sparking ill-advised fires with driftwood. No way off, no rescue, only that which she makes for herself.

Kylo had been there for her, when it had been so hard—so impossible—to speak about what she felt. How he had broken down, when speaking about Poe. The complication of being the notorious son in the family of high-achievers, when Poe had arrived and been so good. 

He had been good. 

Rey sobs, her tears mingling with the shower water. Poe had been good. He hadn’t deserved to die. 

But he was dead. 

He was dead, and Rey was alone. A dancer, waiting for a partner. 

And she’d let Kylo walk right in. 

 


	2. late new year’s eve, 2 am

**** She sees him again, at the bar, and gives him a wide berth. Isn’t sure if Kylo sees her at all. It doesn’t seem like he’s aware of anything, save for the drink in his hand. But his eyes, when she sees them, are red-rimmed. 

And it reminds her, not of the sex, the way she’d come so hard she’d felt the lower half of her body go numb, not the things he’d done to her which made her clit feel like it needed to send him a thank-you card. She thinks about the way he’d wailed and clutched at his heart. The way he’d claimed to know his brother, and then the way he’d wept. 

She’d never heard noises like that come out of a human. Animal noises, raw and wracked and gutting.

Rey finishes her drink and leaves. 

All the while, walking away, she thinks about what might’ve happened, if she had stayed, maybe slid in the seat beside him. Put her hand on his arm and—

—and asked him to come home with her. 

Instead, she keeps on walking. 

 

* * *

The new year arrives. Rey goes to parties, clings to Hux’s arm, smiles and enjoys herself. She slips out of her dress, feels another man’s hands on her back when Hux touches her, tries to be okay. 

She isn’t okay. 

She drinks too much champagne, kisses him until she doesn’t ache to feel Kylo kissing her back instead. Maybe Hux knows she’s a liar, maybe he knows and doesn’t care. Everything is fine—everything is perfect—and then Kylo has to show up and ruin it all. Reveal it all. 

Reveal her as the liar, the self-denying fraud that she so clearly is. 

The men fight—like some kind of… primate mating display, like two gorillas, defending their territory. (Rey doesn’t want to think about the fact that this makes her territory to be conquered, something to be claimed.) Kylo doesn’t have the right to just show up drunk to her place. She didn’t ask him, didn’t invite him, doesn’t want him here. And if she does, it’s not like this. Half childish petulance, half animal-in-a-trap desperation. 

They are two, drifting together in a sea of grief. Finn, having just come home from his trip, watches in horror. Hux, puffed-up with pride and clearly rankled by Kylo’s lack of control, his intrusion, his very existence, tries to take control in the only way he knows how. 

Violence. 

Rey screams when the punch connects. She can’t picture a man of Kylo’s size and bulk going down, but the drink and whatever else he’s had before he came here is making him weave like a train going off the rails. 

There’s a point, where he’s on the floor, nose bleeding from Hux’s punch, that it feels as if she’s the one that’s thrown the punch instead. 

“Are you fucking him, too?”

And Rey’s blood runs cold. 

Hux throws a fit—she knew he would, knew that this house of cards would come crashing down at some point. Maybe this is the crueler way, but… Rey knows that she was just stalling. Delaying the inevitable. 

They were never meant to be what Hux wanted them to be. She could never be his dutiful socialite wife. 

She would never fit in his dance, and he… Hux would never fit in hers. All of her illusions about her independence, about her not needing anyone, anything…

Now she knows. She does need. And what she needs isn’t Hux. 

In the shower, Rey lets the water come down over her face, her skin. She imagines that there’s dirt on it, some kind of visible stain, proof of what she’s done. But her skin is as pale and soft as ever, flushed red from the heat of the water. She can’t see it, can’t clean it off, can’t even—and this is the worst part, the part that she forces herself to see and acknowledge—make herself feel bad about what she’s done, either. 

Being with Kylo, it had been… intense. Strange. Different. And she’d never really been with someone who’d been so demanding. So intense. 

She shudders as she shuts the water off. Steps out, dries herself off with a towel. Thinks about the softness of Kylo’s slack face, peaceful and young-looking, when he’d fallen asleep on the couch. 

Not fallen asleep; passed out. Because she’s only ever seen him drunk, and he’s possibly an addict. He has problems that run deeper than just one specific thing. 

Maybe she does, too. If she’s the kind of person who—

_ Enough.  _

And Rey dries her hair off, and thinks about… demanding hands, red-rimmed eyes. Crying and pain and bliss. Regrets, and memories. 

Let him sleep, she thinks, darting out of the bathroom and into her own room as quietly as she can. 

She doesn’t look back. 

(In hindsight, this, too, like everything else involving Kylo, is a mistake.)

* * *

“When did you wake up?”

Kylo is standing in her doorway. 

Kylo is shutting the door behind him. 

Kylo is—

“Honestly,” he says, “I’m not sure I am awake.”

Rey swallows thickly, and sits down on her bed. She’s still wrapped up in her towel, watching him, wide-eyed, as he steps closer to her, closer still. 

“Are you?”

“What?” It’s just that there’s so fucking  _ much _ of him—she has to tilt her head up to look into his eyes. 

“Are you awake?”

Rey stares at him. She shakes her head. 

“I… I had maybe two glasses of champagne,” she answers, “and it was a while ago. I’m—”

“That’s not what I’m askin’ and you know it.”

“What the hell do you want me to say?”

“I want you to tell me if this—” 

“Kylo, we’ve been here before.”

“—is something you want to stop, before things start getting more serious.” He takes his hand, thumbs down around her jawline, holding her right there at the tender place where throat meets chin. “We have been here before. You wanna go again?”

The moment hangs on a breath. On a heartbeat. And  _ oh god  _ she’s a bad person, she’s a liar, and she’s unfaithful and she—she  _ wants _ this. She wants it more than she can express. 

And so, in moments where words won’t do, touch has to suffice; Rey reaches for his belt.

“Hey, hey,” he says. “Hey, stop—”

Her hands are already tugging down his fly, rubbing at the bulge in his briefs like it’s about to grant her three wishes. 

“Rey, stop.” Kylo takes her hands in his. 

She looks up, more than a little confused; it was pretty clear, the way things were heading, and now he’s saying no?

But there’s tenderness in his eyes. 

“You want this, then you can’t check out on me.” Kylo looks down at her like he’s pinned her to the spot. “You can’t go away. You gotta be here. You gotta be in this place.”

“I wasn’t—”

She takes a shuddering breath.  _ No more lies.  _

She nods. “Okay.”

“I didn’t know, you and him were…” His voice trails off; his grip loosens on her hands, but he doesn’t let them drop. Doesn’t pull them away.  

Rey tentatively puts her hand back on his erection. He inhales sharply, a muscle in his jaw working. Eyes dark and intent on hers. 

“Sorry ‘bout that,” he says, voice a bit quieter. “Didn’t mean’ta—”

“I don’t want to talk about him.”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. You tell me, honey. You just tell me.”

She tugs the elastic band down, pulls the belt and slacks down too, and watches as his cock springs free. It fits in her hand so nicely, warm and soft and thick and hard. Rey doesn’t normally spend a lot of time thinking about dicks. It’s more about what’s attached to them that matters. But in this case, there’s just enough of an edge of the champagne still fizzing in her veins, and she feels bold and wanton and needy. 

Rey leans in, licks an open-mouthed stripe across the wet head of his cock. Hears and feels him groan, his hands in her hair. She has half a mind to rile him up and leave him high and dry just like he left her, but the sounds he’s making are too good, and it makes her feel too powerful to be like this. Leading him around by his own cock. Messily working him over. 

With her mouth on him, the unhinged monologue of filth just falls from his lips—

_ —so good with your sweet fucking mouth, christ, like that— _

Rey hollows her cheeks and circles his head with her slick-wet lips, hears him growl and feels him as his hips barely resist a thrust too deeply into her mouth. 

_ —can’t believe you’re real, can’t believe you’re doin’ this to me, Rey, yeah, shit— _

At some point, her towel slips down. At some point, his slacks and briefs do, too. Then he’s hoisting her up, setting her down not on the bed but on the top of her dresser. A thrifted, powder-blue antique that is built for her weight but not for his, but neither of them seem to give a shit at all. He’s tall—long-legged, sturdily-built, just at the right height to tug her right to the edge of the dresser and angle her where he wants. 

Where she wants, too. 

Because submission—sucking his cock—is about power. And this, this moment of giving herself over to someone, is fully about control. Control of herself, control of this moment. Awareness. She’s  _ awake _ . 

When he enters her, his eyes stay locked on hers. 

“You still with me?” he asks, voice a little tremulous, shaken. 

Rey nods. Bites her lip. Fuck if he doesn’t feel like he was made to fill her. 

“Yeah,” she manages. 

And then the slow, easy drag of his cock as he withdraws makes her cling to him. He doesn’t complain. Just gives her that knowing half-smile, like he understands. 

Turns out, antiques are built much more sturdily than she’d feared. 

* * *

Rey wakes when the phone rings.

Kylo… isn’t there. 

She rubs her hand across her face, legs and lower back aching from what they’ve done. Last night—bent over the bed, his silk tie in her hands, not binding them but just connecting, his cock hammering into her, hitting that spot so fucking right she’d smudged tears and old mascara into her already-filthy sheets, as she’d cried out and begged and told him—

Told him too much. 

She’d bared herself too much. 

All of this was just… too fucking much—and the phone won’t stop ringing. 

Rey gets the call just as it switches over to the answering machine. Hux is apologetic; he doesn’t remember much of last night, he’d had a bit too much coke, a bit too much to drink. Rey sincerely doubts that he thinks any of this can be repaired, but—

Back to the illusion. Surrender is terrifying, and last night, with Kylo, she’d gone too far. 

It’s time to pull things back together. 

It’s time to stop this, before it went beyond the point at which she could control it. Or control herself. 

* * *

He leaves.

_ “I’m not dangerous…” _

But he is. Not the way she means, not violent or… he would never raise his fists to her, she knows that, feels it in her bones. 

Kylo leaves. 

It feels like it takes a crowbar to get him out. 

Like he sticks like gum on the bottom of her shoe. 

_ “You’re two different people… which one of you is the liar?” _

Fuck. 

She aches for him—not just from what they’ve done, although there’s plenty of reason for that. An abundance of inches worth of reasons, to say the least of—

No, it’s deeper than a physical ache. It’s something sharper, something that twists and writhes in her gut and makes her feel like—

He’s gone. 

Rey sits down on the couch, catching her breath, which has grown short and sharp in the echoes of her apartment door slamming shut. 

_ I don’t want you to think that this is more than what it is… _

_ I don’t want you. I  _ **_don’t_ ** _ like you. You scare me… _

And when the hurt had bloomed in his eyes, when the understanding had hit, Rey had felt as if she’d been gutted. When he’d walked out—when she’d pushed him out, not with her hands, but with her words. Words as sharply honed as any knives in the drawer. Sharper, probably. Poe had been the one to keep the knives sharp, not her. And now there’s another fragmented hole in her life, not just the outline from Poe’s death but now this. The one that Rey herself is responsible for. 

_ Call him back— _ the impulse is hammering like a drum in her head, pounding in her pulse. Rey draws her knees up to her chest instead, wraps her arms around her shins, and bows her head, trying to catch her breath. Last night, the second time they’d been together, Rey had felt…

Complete. Known and seen and held and—

Loved. 

Impossible. She lets out a laugh, maybe a sob. Maybe there’s no difference anymore. Because Ben—Kylo—whatever the fuck his name was, he’d come into her life like a hurricane, come into her body like she was an oasis, left her shaken and trembling and grasping for contact. Then he’d given her all of it, everything she’d asked for, with words, with touch, with nothing at all. 

_ You scare me… _

It was the truth, and yet… 

She was afraid. She was so afraid—but not of him. 

She was afraid of herself. 

Afraid of needing, afraid of the terror of getting. Afraid of the inevitable letting go, the tearing away. 

Better to do the tearing, better to know when the pain is coming. It’s just like ripping of a plaster, isn’t it. Do it all in one go, get it over with. 

Rey sobs, then, unable to hold it in any longer. It  _ hurts _ . 

But she’ll get through this. This is just another death. And she survived the first one, so she can—she must—survive this.


	3. the apartment is dark; it is after midnight

“I’m stone-cold sober.”

“And I’m half-drunk…” 

Kylo stands half in shadow, half in light, in her apartment. 

She’d told him, once—the last time she’d seen him—that he scared her. 

He doesn’t know that it had been a lie, then. Just as it's a lie now... well, after the initial shock of having someone in her place when she hadn’t expected him… No, it's something else. The thought of what he’s offering, what he’s promising, _that’s_ what scares her. 

She says: “I don’t want this.”

What she means is: “This isn’t the path I would’ve ever chosen—the way I would’ve choreographed my life to be. The person I thought I was.”

He says: “I know. I don’t want it either.”

And Rey thinks, H _ e was there, tonight—he saw the dance, the dance that was me and Poe, until it was me and him. Is it me and him?  _

Finn’s note goes up in flame in the ashtray, catching quickly, crumbling to feathery ash. 

_ Why should love always be tragic?  _

But this is tragic. Every start, every new rebirth means a self-immolation. Kylo touches her and she feels as fragile as the burnt paper. There is no happy ending to this moment. The way he makes her feel, when he embraces her on the couch, is just as untethered, just as free and free-falling as before. Like every time. Drunk or high, sober or—

He cries into her hair. Grief has entombed them together, but at least they’re  _ together _ . All this time she’d been fighting to define herself in some way, any way, besides what she was. Kylo scared her, because he held up a mirror and made her look at it. 

Maybe that was why she scared him, too. Rey looks up at him as he steps closer, as he embraces her, wondering what it was he sees in her, in that mirror. What was it that makes him look at her that way. 

“That was us up there,” Kylo is drawing her in, holding her tight to his body; he smells… he smells good to her, clean, no drink. Just  _ body _ and  _ him _ . “Me and you.”

She nods. Lets him hold her. 

This is them, down here. Him and her. Physical, tangible and real. Terrifying. 

“You said none of us knew about him,” Kylo says, wetly, into her hair. “I knew. We knew. Some of us—people didn’t want to know, or see it…”

Rey thinks of Poe and feels a pang in her gut. Poe, and his lover, two young, beautiful, brilliant men, caught in the water and lost to the waves. Gone forever. So many dances, so many smiles. So much life, just… washed away. 

She holds Kylo tighter.

They find their way to the sofa.

“We knew. How could we not have known?”

At this, Rey bristles; she’s heard those words—some like them—in a voice that’s much more accusatory, much more cruelly-meant.  _ Male dancers,  _ you know.  _ They’re all— _ followed by a insinuation via raised eyebrows, a smirk, a waggle of the head. Rey hates this implication. The joke his love has become to so many. 

“He told us, told me, anyway,” Kylo continues, voice low and soft, like a memory, “when he was back home, maybe… five years ago. We knew. I knew.”

“Oh.” It’s all Rey can manage. 

“I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.” His words tumble out a bit hastily, but nowhere near the mile-a-minute speed of his random-access ranting before. “Just that we knew, and wanted—well, isn’t that what anyone wants? For people to see them? Take them how they are?”

There’s a huge man crying in her lap; confessing in her lap, although she feels as if that isn’t quite the right word, because it conjures up a scent-memory of incense and solemnity and gilded icons, staring down at sinners. The one or two times some foster-family had dragged her to mass. The perforated screen between her and a deep-voiced priest. 

Rey plays with his hair. She doesn’t feel like a sinner, although she probably should. 

He isn’t one either. And anyway, that’s not what this is. 

There’s nothing to confess—nothing illicit, nothing wrong. Just honesty. Honesty so raw it scrapes across her skin like a blister popping under pasteboard and satin, as the dance goes on, light and easy and flawless. A beautiful, painful illusion. 

“I just… I didn’t want you to think I thought less of him, or—”

“I didn’t,” she says. “Kylo—”

“Ben,” he says, looking up at her, “Would you—can you call me Ben?”

“I thought you…” she swallows, and gives him a curt nod. “Yes. Okay. Ben.”

He shivers at this. The sound of his name in her mouth. Her hands comb back through his hair. 

Rey says his name again, softer this time. An invitation. 

She thinks about the way he’d said it, what he’d said when he’d seen her—startled her:  _ I’m stone-cold sober.  _

So this is what sobriety looks like: Tears and confessions and peeling back the layers of a man who has the eyes of a frightened child and a mouth made for utter sin. 

All at once, the fight goes out of her. All of the fear from the performance, the anxiety about the show, the tension of finding this man in her space. It washes away, and leaves only the two of them behind. 

One couple, then two, then three. Then just her avatar, pleading with some not-Poe, not-Kylo who she couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge. Now she can. 

Now she knows; she understands. And Ben just looks at her with those eyes. Lifts her hand in his and draws it to his mouth, pressing a kiss to her bony knuckles, then turning it over, and kissing the center of her wrist. Right where the pulse hammers the hardest. 

(Strictly speaking, that’s not true; it’s pulsing wildly between her legs, has been since she saw him standing by the window. She's trapped in that fluttery space once more, a part of her she'd thought was dead, too, has come back to life. A painful revelation, waiting to be unpinned.)

He’s got her hand in his. He’s got a question in his eyes. 

So she lets him draw her into their next dance. 

* * *

Sex with sober Kylo—sex with  _ Ben— _ is the same. 

The same breathless response, when she lowers herself onto his cock. The same faint twinge of _ tight-sweet-good-big _ as she takes him. 

The same hands, holding her hips. 

The same intensity, the same adoration in his eyes. 

Sex with him is different, so different. 

Like this, in the daytime, the light hits his eyes and turns them golden-amber. After he’d stayed the night, Rey’d awoken to find him still in her bed. Not asleep, not quite awake. Those sweet eyes watching her, tracing down over the bare skin exposed by her tangled sheets. The bed is small with him in it, but he’d tucked her back against him after they’d made love, and she’d slept in his arms like…

Like it was right. Like it was good, and safe. 

Now, she tosses her mess of brown hair back over her shoulder, thighs straining over the wideness of his torso as she slowly, achingly slowly, rolls her hips. Just to watch him blush like that. Just to watch his plush, kiss-bitten mouth purse and relax. She lightly scratches her nails down his chest, and he answers her by cupping her breasts in his hands. 

“I love your little tits so fucking much,” he murmurs. “Fuck, Rey… I love your body so fucking much…”

“Yeah?” Rey rolls her hips again, “What do you like?”

“Fuck,” he says, and the rough pitch of it, the half-awake rumble of it, makes Rey clench down on him. “Fuck, I love—I love these, I love the way you… fuck, like that—please—”

His right hand trails down to her belly, and his left, around the side of her hip, and his eyes close as his neck arches a bit; Rey picks up the pace and he seems to be hypnotized by the movement of her body. 

She’s never rendered anyone inarticulate before. It’s a heady sort of power, one she could get drunk on. 

“Ben,” she says, testing the name in her mouth. “ _ Ben… _ ”

“Yeah?” He answers her with his eyes still closed. 

“Feels good,” is all Rey can manage, hips rolling steadily, taking him exactly the way she wants. “Feels so good…”

There’s nothing more articulate that needs to be said. Not now, not when the gates of honesty have, at last, been flung open between them. Not when she’s already said it all, the words that cut her lips as they fell, the truths she could no longer deny. 

Needing someone.

Craving someone. 

Craving  _ him _ —the man who now lays beneath her spread legs, letting her ride him, feeling her move. The man whose eyes see into her, and don’t shy away. The man whose cock fills her perfectly, tightly, fully. He's everything, everything. 

His hand reaches out, finds hers; fingers interlink, fiercely tight—need to need, skin to skin. His, and hers. 

She cries out, close, so tremulously close. She calls out, and he answers. She falls, and he catches her—chest pressed to burning chest, bodies moving in a dance that requires no rehearsal, and begs no apology. 

He catches her, and into their shared, consuming fire, they both fall. 


End file.
